I know it is a little early, but I scheduled a craft this week that would hopefully get the kids rearing and ready for Mardi Gras. We decorated Mardi Gras masks.

I am a big supporter of letting the kids have as much freedom to decide what their craft is going to look like as possible. That means I don't really do any pre-cutting or preparation of materials ahead of time. While I could have just bought the blank masks for them to decorate, I decided to by a couple that the kids could use as templates and buy different colored sheets of foam. They could then use the mask templates to help them cut out the foam masks to their taste in shape.

They then could use the feathers, glitter glue, ribbon, adhesive gems, and markers to decorate their masks to taste. The above picture was the result. As you can see, the masks do a great job of protecting identities, and I whited out the one exception.

The kids had a great time, and really enjoyed showing off the results to the rest of the library staff. In fact, one of them had so much fun that she said she was sad that today was going to be Friday because she can't come to the library after school on Friday. I thought that was really cool!